It seems like developers Avalanche and id Software don’t want there to be any limitations with how you explore the open world presented to you in RAGE 2. From the beginning, the entire open world will be available for you to explore, including the final boss of the game. You can spend as much time as you want exploring the world, and the more you engage with the world, the more powerful you become.

This sounds a lot like the open world in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which, too, presented players with the option to go anywhere and do anything from the get go, including making a mad rush for the final boss straight up. It is also very categorically different from how most open worlds these days are handled.

“As soon as you finish the introduction, the door opens and you can go anywhere,” id Software studio director Tim Willits told VG247 at QuakeCon. “There are some things you want to do, but we also want you to explore, talk to folks, play at your own pace. We’re trying not to do that sector-based open-world game.”

The one thing that id and Avalanche are conscious of this time around is that the world needs to be colorful and aesthetically pleasing, so that players do feel compelled to spend time exploring and uncovering it. Indeed, this lack of color was one of the biggest problems with the original RAGE (and most games that generation, to be fair).

“RAGE was all sorts of brown, Mad Max was all sorts of brown, so both teams were like, ‘Yeah, let’s not do brown anymore’,” Willits said. “Though we still have a lot of brown, but we’ve got swamplands, overground cities, forests, the deserts – we have variety, and we add more personality and colour to those environments.”

Which is good to hear- as is the knowledge of how the open world is going to be structured. Really, I feel if you’re going to do an open world, this is the only way to meaningfully do it- if you can’t commit to this, then maybe your game doesn’t need to be open world.

RAGE 2 is due out next year for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Watch its recent gameplay video through here– it looks fantastic. A Switch version of the game has not bee confirmed, though the developers have confirmed that they are looking into it.

When the Doom Slayer was ripping, tearing, grappling, and murdering demons in last week’s reveal of DOOM Eternal, some of us noticed a little interesting detail during the demo. We’re talking about the “Extra Life” that was acquired. What does it mean, and does it signal the sequel taking a more retro-esque approach to its checkpoint system?

Well, sort of. VG247 posed the question to executive producer Marty Stratton at QuakeCon 2018, who clarified, “It’s just like our checkpoint system. It’s just now you don’t have to go all the way back to the checkpoint and play back through that combat encounter.”

While the regular checkpoint system still seems to be in place, the Extra Life is like a “get out of jail free”. As Stratton says, “So if you’re almost to another checkpoint or you’re in a boss fight or something, your extra life, if you die, kicks in and the screen goes grey and you are invulnerable for a little bit. You can keep fighting, reposition yourself, and you’re right back in the action where you left off without losing any progress.”

This system seems to have been implemented keeping in mind the new Invasion mechanic, where other players can control random demons and invade your game for murder. If you’re suddenly ganked by some demons, then you no longer have to worry about starting from the last checkpoint.

Creative director Hugo Martin said, “They do work in invasions. It still counts as a death, but yeah, you don’t get penalised by going back, you can continue where you left off. It’s a fun gameplay loop and it’s a proven gameplay loop – it’s a safety net you’ve provided for yourself.”

What happens if you don’t have an Extra Life and get invaded? Tough luck, we suppose.

Still, this mechanic could also be useful for something like the Ultra-Nightmare difficulty in DOOM (2016), where the game just flat-out ends once the player is killed. DOOM Eternal is out next year for Xbox One, PS4, PC, and Nintendo Switch, so there’s still plenty of time to learn more about the game.

While Bethesda has been busy assuaging most fans’ concerns about Fallout 76 and its inherently multiplayer premise, another title that’s had a bit of scrutiny is Wolfenstein: Youngblood. MachineGames’ next iteration in the series is a follow-up to Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, focusing on B.J. Blazkowicz’s twin daughters, who are all grown up and just as deadly.

However, more importantly, it’s a co-op title with a second player capable of controlling one of the daughters. Bethesda has been a big supporter of single-player titles and went as far as to indicate that games like Fallout 76 don’t represent the future of its games. So what gives with turning an inherently single-player franchise into a co-op game?

VG247 spoke to Bethesda VP of marketing Pete Hines at QuakeCon 2018, who replied, “We still support single-player stuff as well, or better than pretty much anybody else out there. In UK parlance, we were having a laugh at everybody freaking out about single-player stuff, and that it needed to be saved. But we weren’t trying to say that we only want to make single-player. That’s not what our devs want to do, it’s not what we want to do – we want to do a lot of things, including single-player.”

For Wolfenstein: Youngblood, it was more about the gameplay suiting the premise. “We’re going to continue to do a variety of different things, and it’s all going to be based on what our devs want to do. In the case of Wolfenstein, it was: ‘Well, we want to do this thing where you get to play as one of BJ’s twin daughters’. We were like, ‘What’s the other one doing?’. They were like, ‘Nothing, or maybe they can be an AI companion’. ‘Well, if she’s an AI companion, could you let somebody else play the other one?’.”

This isn’t like A Way Out though – co-op is purely optional, so if you want to experience the entire game solo with the other daughter controlled by an AI, you can. “It’s co-op, but it’s kind of the same game because if somebody’s not playing with you it doesn’t feel dramatically different. She’s still there, whether it’s an AI or a person. It doesn’t change the experience wholesale. It’s not like it’s Skyrim and all of a sudden some dude turns up. Ultimately, as with all things, we’re interested in what our devs think,” said Hines.

As of now, we still haven’t seen any gameplay for Wolfenstein: Youngblood. It’s scheduled to release next for Xbox One, PS4, and PC, so how MachineGames will balance the franchise’s brutality with another character in mind remains to be seen. There’s also Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, a VR title for HTC Vive and PlayStation VR out next year, to look out for.

Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout 76 received tons of new information at QuakeCon 2018, from how perks would work to PvP, and the consequences of trying to kill someone who’s not fighting back. However, last week’s announcement about the upcoming beta being available only through Bethesda.net and not on Steam still sticks out for some people.

That being said, don’t expect this to be a trend for all Bethesda games going forward. At QuakeCon 2018, Bethesda VP of marketing Pete Hines told IGN, “We did not announce ‘all future Bethesda games will not be on Steam.’ That is not what we said. We said ‘this game will be available exclusively on Bethesda.net.’”

Which is much like the clarification from Fallout 76 director Todd Howard, who stated that the online open-world survival game doesn’t “mark the future” for all Bethesda titles. That being said, is there a possibility other upcoming Bethesda titles, like DOOM Eternal (which also got a recent gameplay premiere at QuakeCon 2018), not heading to Steam as well?

Hines noted that “We haven’t decided on anything else, this is specific to Fallout 76 given the kind of game it is — it’s an online, ongoing game. [Doom Eternal] may or may not, but it hasn’t been decided on anything else yet.” Furthermore, as to the possibility of Fallout 76 heading to Steam at a later time, Hines declined to a give a definitive answer. “Is it possible? I guess, but I honestly couldn’t give you any a guarantee one way or the other on whether it will or won’t,” he said.

Fallout 76 is out on November 14th for Xbox One, PS4, and PC, with the beta’s player selection starting in October.

QuakeCon 2018 has brought with it information blowouts on a number of upcoming Bethesda titles, including the likes of RAGE 2 and DOOM Eternal. Another title that has received a massive information dump is the upcoming Fallout 76. All the info in this post comes from the Fallout 76 panel and Q&A session (which you can view below). In attendance were Todd Howard, Development Director Chris Meyer, and Project Leader Jeff Gardiner.

For starters, if you’re worried about Fallout 76’s online centric nature and how it will differ from the series’ core identity- you shouldn’t be. According to the devs, the game is going to be 80% similar to what you would expect from a Fallout game, while 20% of it is going to be completely new stuff.

Among those new things is the changes Fallout 76 brings to the VATS system. It will no longer pause the action, for obvious reasons, and will instead be in real time. Additionally, choosing which body parts to is going to be a perk, so you won’t be able to do this from the very beginning.

Other things people may have been equally concerned about – such as modding and and private servers – are also going to be fully supported, Bethesda has confirmed. The game also has voice chat, as well as proximity voice chat, but that was pretty much expected anyway. Oh, and you can also change the look of your character whenever you want.

Meanwhile, PvP is also something Bethesda have spoken quite a bit about in the last few weeks, and they’ve now given more details on how it will work. First of all, PvP doesn’t activate until you’re at Level 5, but even after that it seems like it’ll be a completely optional thing. You can, for instance, mark yourself as a pacifist for all players in your server, while you can also block specific players, so that they can’t see you (and vice versa, presumably).

If you don’t want to do that, Bethesda are still taking the possibility of “griefing” and turning it into an interesting gameplay mechanic. If you see another player and hit them for the first time, you won’t do a ton of damage. After that, the other player has the option of either ignoring you (or running away), or hitting back.

If they hit back, the game reads that as an acceptance of PvP invitation, and allows you both to do more damage to each other. If the player you kill is higher levelled than you, you get higher rewards (the bigger the gulf between your levels, the higher the rewards, essentially). If you get killed and want to get revenge on the player that killed you, the reward for doing so gets doubled.

However, if the other player runs away and you decide to be a dick and go after them anyway, Fallout 76’s going to put a unique twist on that as well. If you kill said player, firstly, you get no reward, while you will also then appear to everyone else in the server as a red star on the map. You become a wanted murderer, and the game places a bounty on your head.

Meanwhile, if you’re on the other side of things, dying doesn’t involve a lot of harsh penalties. You essentially lose your junk items (which you can use in crafting and upgrading), but you don’t lost the valuable stuff in your inventory. You can still go back and pick up that junk again, assuming no other player has gotten to it first. You can, though, also choose to place your items in stashes, of which there are several throughout the map, and cannot be accessed by other players.

Bethesda also gave some details on how respawning will work. Essentially, after dying, you can respawn at the closest spawn point or at Vault 76 for free, but if you want to spawn at some distant point, that will cost you some caps (which, of course, is the in-game currency in the world of Fallout). The greater the distance to the respawn point from where you died last, the higher the cost in caps.

Meanwhile, details on camps and settlements were also revealed. As we already know, settlements are essentially portable, with blueprints allowing players to pack up their entire settlement and move it elsewhere. This will come in handy, because other players can destroy your settlements with nuclear strikes. Even if that does happen, though, Bethesda says that repairing settlements is pretty easy.

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system was also showcased, which basically encompasses progression, perks, and upgradation, as Fallout players would know very well. Upon levelling up, you get S.P.E.C.I.A.L. skills, which are accompanied by cards- these cards are perks. If that sounds a bit too lootbox-y, don’t worry. These perks are not randomized.

Well, not all of them anyway. Every few levels (two levels at first, then five as you progress), the game will give you a perk card pack which will include random perks, to provide you with perks that you may not have picked yourself (possibly). Other than these instances, though, you can essentially pick any card you meet the requirements for.

Equipping these cards costs S.P.E.C.I.A.L points, and each card has different point costs, depending on what perks they offer. If you want, you can pick the same card multiple times and then combine those to give you a more powerful version of that perk. Equipping it, of course, will require more points.

Once you hit level 50, you will no longer get S.P.E.C.I.A.L points. You will, however, continue to get more cards, and hence, more perks. So while you can’t continue to add on to your abilities any longer, you can still swap around the cards you have equipped, and continue to unlock new perks.

Finally, the guys from Bethesda Game Studios also spent some time talking about the game’s music and soundtrack, which, interestingly enough, has been described as having an “unbelievable amount of bizarre forties music.” Which, of course, means that there’s a lot of licensed music in the game- more so than any other Fallout game, in fact.

There are also radio stations you can listen to in the game- but how does that work, exactly, given we’re in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland? Who’s jockeying those stations? That mystery remains unsolved. The game’s OST is being composed by Inon Zur.

Fallout 76 launches on November 14 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Stay tuned for more updates.

QuakeCon 2018 has brought with it loads of exciting new information for a number of upcoming games, from RAGE 2 to DOOM Eternal. However, they was one more announcement at the event that may have been relatively more low key but was still pretty exciting. Escalation Studios have joined Bethesda, and been renamed as Bethesda Game Studios Dallas. The studio had already been acquired by ZeniMax, Bethesda’s parent company, in 2016, and now they’ve been brought in under the Bethesda Game Studios name.

This, of course, adds even more people to BGS, which keeps on growing, but there’s a lot of reasons to be excited about this. The studio will be helping with the development of a number of upcoming titles, which includes plenty of big names- there is, of course, Starfield, the upcoming sci-fi epic, but they will also be lending their hand for the development of the upcoming Fallout 76, and the mobile Elder Scrolls title, The Elder Scrolls: Blades.

“We’ve been working with Tom, Marc, and the team at Escalation for a long time,” Todd Howard said while making the announcement. “They’ve already delivered amazing games with us, and we knew we could do even bigger things together.”

In the past, Escalation has worked with Bethesda on games such as Skyrim VR, Fallout VR, and the Nintendo Switch port of Skyrim. Starfield, of course, has been in development more or less since 2015, but in spite of that, we’ve been warned that the game is still a long ways off.

Hopefully, the added support of Escalation, or BGS Dallas now, will help fast-track the process a little bit. Starfield is being planned as a game for next-gen consoles, but there is still a chance that it launches for the PS4 and Xbox One.

DOOM 2016, for those of you who might remember, had a multiplayer mode. It was a very bland multiplayer mode, and not at all what the game would go on to be remembered for- but it did exist. It was outsourced by id to an external developer, and while they took over it later to try and salvage it (and even did a fairly good job of it), by then, the damage was done.

Given all the information we have heard of DOOM Eternal so far- especially with its Dark Souls style invasions– you would have been forgiven for assuming the new game won’t have a traditional multiplayer mode. But it will- and what’s more, id Software will be developing it entirely in house this time around, too. Speaking to Polygon, id Software’s Marty Stratton announced that the competitive multiplayer mode from DOOM 2016 will be returning in Eternal (although he was very careful to point out that the new PvP won’t just be an extension of the one from that game), though he also noted that id isn’t ready to talk about that just yet.

“The Invasion stuff is just kind of one of the ways that we’re going to make the DOOM experience social,” Stratton said. “But we’re not really going deep into that. We are working on a PvP component. It is new. It’s not an extension of what we did last time. So it’s new.”

So that’s something to keep an eye out for, too. I wonder how id plans to do PvP better this time around. Meanwhile, we’ve also learned that the game won’t have a feature you might remember from the 2016 title, SnapMap, but will have single player DLC. DOOM Eternal launches for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A ton of gameplay footage for the game was recently released- check it out through here.

DOOM on Nintendo Switch must have done hella well, because it looks like Bethesda and id Software will be bringing DOOM Eternal– the fantastic looking sequel to the game, which seems to expand on the original and go bigger and better in almost every possible way- to Nintendo’s hybrid tablet day and date with the other versions. That id Tech 7 must be very scalable, if they are doing this.

Bethesda tweeted the platforms the game will be launching on, and Switch was, sure enough, included in that list. Not just that, it looks like Switch port wizards Panic Button, who were also responsible for bringing over the original DOOM to the platform, will be heading up the Switch version of the game this time as well (they sent out a really tongue in cheek response to Bethesda’s tweet announcing the Switch version).

So, Nintendo fans- this time you don’t have to wait. You get a major, AAA third party multiplat release the same time as everyone else. Exactly as Panic Button said.

DOOM Eternal will launch… at some point in the future, it doesn’t actually have a release date, window, or even year yet. It comes out on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, in addition to Switch.

We hope you're ready. #DOOM Eternal will launch on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. pic.twitter.com/J9DCga2YoW

— DOOM (@DOOM) August 10, 2018

Wait? #NintendoSwitch, too?! https://t.co/uOXPFAw9If

— Panic Button (Official) (@PanicButtonGame) August 10, 2018

Bethesda Softworks and id Software certainly made us wait for its world premiere of DOOM: Eternal’s gameplay. Cliche as it sounds, it was worth every minute. Check out the footage for yourself below.

The footage starts off with the Doom Slayer’s new weapons on display, including a new shotgun with a grappling hook at the end, and the Ballista, which fires explosive bolts. The Slayer also has the ability to dash, both on the ground and in mid-air, allowing for quick movement and side-stepping. Another new ability allows the Slayer to supercharge melee attacks after Glory Kills, sending groups of demons flying with a single punch.

Levels have also been expanded more in scope, and it’s possible to dash and grapple all over the place while pelting demons with rockets. Combine this with the lighting, texture work, and overall amount of stuff going on, that too at 60 FPS, and DOOM: Eternal just looks unbelievable.

Currently in development for Xbox One, PS4, and PC (and Nintendo Switch as well), DOOM: Eternal releases in 2019. What are your thoughts on the gameplay? Let us know in the comments below.

Though id Software hasn’t revealed DOOM Eternal yet at QuakeCon 2018, it did give us something to make the wait easier – a new extended gameplay trailer for RAGE 2, developed by id Software and Avalanche Studios. The trailer offers a bit of context to your character’s journey, before descending into full-on explosive madness. Check it out below.

We learn more about the different enemy factions, like the Goon Squad, the Wingstick’s new abilities (including targeting enemies around corners), and the different biomes in the game’s world. Convoy assaults are also showcased, as players attempt to take down enormous vehicles flanked by bodyguards. Different weapons and abilities, a variety of different rides, and so on are promised, with much more to see in the coming months.

RAGE 2 will be coming to Xbox One, PS4 and PC in Spring 2019. Along with no loading screens, the development team is promising a seamless experience of first person and vehicular mayhem that will deliver on the potential seen in the original RAGE.